Tag Archives: Facebook

“Laura Mickes and her team took 200Facebook stat us updates, stripped them of their context, and showed them to 32 participants alongside other decontextualised lines from 200 different fiction and nonfiction books.

The participants were shown the lines on a screen, briefly, and given the choice of saying whether it had been repeated from earlier in the experiment or not.

The results found that, across the board, people were one and a half times as likely to remember a Facebook post as a line from a book — and, when a similar experiment was carried out with faces instead of the lines from novels, it showed that people were two and a half times as likely to remember the Facebook posts over the faces.”

“the U.S. Strategic Command (overseeing the nuclear strike) will concentrate on military computer hacking and cyberdefenses. The Joint Staffs will take responsibility for deception operations, while Special Operations Command will take the lead in military information gathering aimed at supporting secret operations. […] the Central Command (covering the greater Middle East) has recently purchased a $2.7 million software, especially designed by San-Diego based Ntrepid. The material will permit the manipulation of social media through the use of fake online “personas” managed by the military, followed by all kinds of infiltration and intelligence operations, while being able to keep the trickery under the radar.”

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“The theory is simple and reasonable: the more you know about what is happening right now, the better you’ll be at predicting what will happen next. One United States intelligence agency is planning to do just that — using Google, Twitter, Facebook, and anything else that provides a window on current events and trends. […]

The kinds of sources of information that the project will be consulting are referred to as OSI, or Open Source Indicators — such as “web search trends, blogs, microblogs, internet traffic, webcams, financial markets, and many others” according to the notice. Using “continuous, automated analysis” of these indicators, IARPA hopes to “anticipate and/or detect societal disruptions, such as political crises, disease outbreaks, economic instability, resource shortages, and natural disasters.”

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Recently Malcolm Gladwell weighed in on the relevance of Facebook and Twitter. His answer was a vigorous headshake, so vigorous the head could actually unscrew. Seems Gladwell unnerved a touchy subject. Everyone is running in circles, like headless roosters. Are Social Media of any use to writers / novelists?

“Let’s talk about work, the job of writing. It’s the only thing that counts. And even that calls for a good deal of indiscretion. Too much publicity in the way people talk about these things. We’re objects of publicity. It’s revolting. It’s high time people took a cure of modesty. In literature as in everything else we’re befouled by publicity. It’s disgraceful. I say: do your job and shut up, that’s the only way. People will read it or they won’t read it, that’s their business. The only thing for the author to do is to make himself scarce.”

Jack SpyWriter King

Novelist. Author of espionage and conspiracy. Twice knifed in the abdomen, earned a green belt in Kyok-sul, and couriered top secret government documents. Schmoozing the corridors of power, greed and corruption has become inspiration for my novels.

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